I'd say he's at least partially wrong. Diseases are often cause by lack of knowledge and education, outburst can often be contained with good means of communication. I know people doing projects that use the internet (or cellphone text messages) to allow remote villages to better manage the available health resources. Internet connectivity allows the local healing person, often a nurse or similar level to send pictures and descriptions of wounds and health issues to a qualified doctor. This allows the doctors to actually go to the villages where they're needed most - actually saving lives. So the internet may very well be a live-saving thing.
The other point that people forget is that it's extremely hard to completely eradicate a disease. The only disease that I know of that's completely eradicated is the small pox. Polio, leprosy and even the black death are merely contained to a varying degree, often only in developed countries even though vaccines or cheap, effective treatments exist. So investing in connectivity and helping to spread information may actually be a viable path.
Case in point: Polio is endemic in only three countries today: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. While in Afghanistan it'd be possible for it to be down to the war, in Pakistan and Nigeria it is down to skepticism and misinformation from religious groups (often based in past experiences) that are often amongst the most important information bearers in their communities. When people don't have other sources than a government they don't trust and other biased groups giving them false information, it's no wonder many misinformation proliferate.
The difference with Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan is that it is endemic at least in parts of the countries, meaning it is regularly found in the population and that it is self-sustained. Elsewhere the outbreaks are sporadic and isolated enough that they die back.
Use of social worker and nurse pairs to do rural visits and vaccinations are much more effective. Verbal communication in the local language can communicate any extra information they need. Question and answer sessions are more fruitful. There is much more information to be gleaned about the community as a whole with a visit. The social worker and nurse can always update data when they get back to a location with internet access and provide a lot more medical context than the residents.
I agree it is not an either or proposition. However I believe the more effective solution, under current conditions, is the human visit. While that happens, continue to build up the infrastructure around these areas; not just internet, but access to clean water, roads to take people to hospitals, access to electricity (local or from a grid), etc.
Steps have to be taken in all directions to grow the radius of community well being.
The population density in some developing countries is extremely low. Botswana for example has roughly 2mio inhabitants of which roughly a quarter live in Gabs and yet another maybe 10% in the next 5 bigger towns. That leaves the rest of the country with an average population density of less than 2person/square km. Bringing people to a hospital by car on a good road can easily take a day or more. It's also not viable to have an educated doctor able to make that choice in each of the remote villages. So you really really need to find a good way to offload that decision to a person that's remote.
n.b. Botswana is a fairly well developed country, I just choose it as an example since I have family ties there and know the situation better than say Namibia which is similar in the population distribution.
If you're imagining a situation in which one individual in an outlying community gets sick with mysterious symptoms that turn out to be malaria, you have simply failed to grasp the magnitude of the problem.
We already have communications options available in those regions. The very same ones used over the last decades, whether its radio, hardline phones, cellular or even satellite.
Doctors and nurses out there already have communications. The issue here is that spending money to provide internet to the masses there is not as beneficial as making sure they live to use it.
So the best available communication is often cellular, if any.
On the other hand malaria is a disease that only affects some parts of the population - namely the one that lives in malaria affected regions. Large parts of southern Africa are mosquito-free, hence no Malaria. To make up for that there's a ton of others diseases, so if you eliminate Malaria, you still have to fight Schistosomiasis [1], Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) [2] HIV and a lot of other diseases for which treatments may or may not exist. In a country where the average infection rate with HIV hovers at about 30% the gain from eradicating Malaria is limited at best. Let's not get into poverty and access to most basic health care.
It's not a simple problem that allows for a simple solution and even eliminating every conceivable disease that affects people in developing countries will only be one minor factor to improving the situation there. Those people need access to knowledge and information as much as they need health care and water. Otherwise they'll forever be stuck on western subsidies - just healthier and longer.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_trypanosomiasis
Doctors and nurses may have communications, but many countries do not have doctors and nurses even in every city, much less every little village.
It's clear we should be careful about not displacing funding for basic health care improvement with basic internet access, but they are not nearly always in opposition, and besides providing health care information, uses such as improving economic opportunities by giving access to market/pricing information also matters - for someone having to spend days getting their stuff to market, going to the right town to get the best price will also affect health: ability to afford sufficient food and shelter for starters.
Telecoms is available world wide for a price, via satellite. Internet is also available worldwide for a price. Broadband is coming in the next few years, worldwide, for a bigger price. Health revolution worldwide is not even on the horizon.
Endemic poverty is a complicated social and political phenomena which is maintained due to a variety of causes. Even if tomorrow you eliminated malaria, it's very doubtful the conditions in any country where it's a problem would improve. A case in point is famine - we have more then enough food today to feed a population of 10 billion or more people on the planet fully. But people still starve to death every day. And even when we give food aid for free, we still keep having the same issue - even when we're actively giving it.
When you start trying to order your problems by perceived importance, we get nothing done. Sure you think, I'd hate to die of malaria. But you live in a first world country - if you don't die of malaria, you don't then imagine that you'll still have nothing to eat tomorrow, or that you lack all of the education you take forgranted. Or that there'll be no jobs, or that even if you work hard you'll still be paying bribes just to get a driver's license. Or come the local elections if you don't guess the right side to be seen supporting you'll be murdered or raped, or both.
> Bill Gates: Google's Project Loon Doesn't 'Uplift the Poor'
Which is a pretty stupid statement to make considering technology does in fact "uplift the poor", since it leads to better economic environment, jobs, and better living conditions.
"Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down. Now they're just doing their core thing. Fine. But the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor,"
Baloons giving internet access to people, doesn't seem to have an obvious uplifting effect on the poor? Could you explain how that will happen?
But seriously, this is HN, do I really need to explain to you why the internet creates job? Why it helps spread information and education? Is this 1997?
I'll give you a first hand experience though, I've lived for 5 years in Peru. There, students told me that Google and the internet has literally changed their life. Before they had to buy expensive books, cross the city or travel to get that book and be able to do copies. Now they just go to the net cafe next door, search on google, get their answer, print it and they're done. For less than half a dollar. A gain in time, money and information and a gain in what these newly educated students will bring to society. I can't even begin to imagine the impact that http://duolingo.com and http://khanacademy.org will have on humanity and the poorest.
You may help educate some people, though the data says educational outcome is more correlated with socio-economic status. And education is correlated with social mobility, but now we are two correlative (at best) steps away from the conclusion you are drawing. We've yet to show any causation...
Your outrage of having to explain this, is misplaced. This is not an obvious fact, nor is it backed by any evidence.
I'm not outraged at all, just surprised. I don't have enough time to explain something like that on HN (especially to someone who may just be trolling or acting in bad faith, not saying you are but you could be) and I don't feel the need to because the evidence that the internet has a positive effect on society and the economy are so overwhelming and just a few google searches away anyway. That's like asking why science or education are a good thing for the economy. Have a nice day :)
We are talking about uplifting the poor. Which is more formally known as "increasing social mobility". The internet doesn't do that... Social mobility in the US did not change significantly with the introduction and growth of the internet... what more evidence do you need against your point?
Curing malaria is inherently a top down priority. Acquiring communications is bottom up.
To take another example, providing a robot chauffeur maybe a solution to a first world problem, but cars kill twice as many people as malaria, so don't knock the robot chauffeur if he cuts traffic accidents by half or better.
This is a classic tale that got retold over and over again for the positive impact of communication. Farmers know the market price - that's not a problem. The problem is they might not be able to sell their crops at market prices due to logistical choices and availability.
If there are only a few trucks today to deliver your produce to the faraway market, you take whatever price the middle man gives you - regardless of the market price - because the other choice is leaving them rotten on the field.
> While at the conference, the young Malawian saw the internet for the first time and within hours began Google-searching for "windmill" and "solar energy" and was amazed with how many hits were returned for each search.
> Kamkwamba was particularly impressed with the speed at which he could achieve things using the internet. "I was very excited when I saw the internet for the first time," he said. "The internet makes transfer of information very instant."
Now imagine a billion people with the same access to information on useful things like good sanitation and building windmills.
Wow isn't he lucky! He actually gets to go to school. Now if only ALL kids in 3rd world countries could have such chance in life.
Also, did you read the linked article? He clearly addresses your point.
>Innovation is a good thing. The human condition – put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes – is improving because of innovation,” he says. But while “technology’s amazing, it doesn’t get down to the people most in need in anything near the timeframe we should want it to”.
Well, what Google and Gates' are doing is still better than Jobs' take on charity from his biography that demeans it:
"“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”"
Which is a funny statement coming from Jobs, since he didn't invent anything either. Ripping off is fine when you add value, like the original Mac which borrowed a lot from Xerox labs prototypes.
BTW, it was the Lisa that built upon the Alto (and added quite a bit of very clever ideas that never made it into the Mac).
The world population has doubled in the last 30 years. Doesn't that scare anyone else?
Sure, you could save a few million poorly educated people from dying. Then what? They're all going to need food, energy, education, housing, etc etc.
Saving people from dying is no good at all if they still have a shitty life and die from something else anyway.
Not that greatly. Birth rates in near enough every country are dropping after having peaked. 7 billion in 2011, 8 billion in 2025, 9 billion in 2043, 10 billion in 2083 is what UNFPA predicts. As education improves and the relative value of each life, and as people live longer on average, the Malthusian catastrophe is one I would think we will avoid. In fact it is this stabilisation of the population that worries me because without any immediate pressure from something else, with no race, no competition and no Sturm and no Drang in progress, will we be destined to find the answer to the Fermi Paradox through our own fate?
Look at this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Populatio... and then consider that while the case of Japan seems about to be a portent for other countries. Doesn't this scare you even more - the thought of the human race ending with a whimper? Or will each of us be, by our current standards, a god among machines living a life a hundred times more valuable than those of their ancestors in their grasp over the earth. If anything these kinds of questions should probably keep you more awake than the thought of a Malthusian catastrophe at this point.
Wow. That's ultra-elitist.
So, let's say you are diagnosed with a rare disease and the doctor gives you two weeks to live unless you get a medicine that costs $1000 which let's assume you can't afford. And you're going to die someday, anyway. Does that mean you have a shitty life and you deserve to die now?
So, amount of money = value of life? Is that your point??
So, I own 10x more money than you (assume) and hence compared to my standards, I think you live a shitty life and you deserve to die. How do you feel now?
Life is invaluable. Money has nothing to do with it.
If you could magically save everyone from dying tomorrow, then well done! You've just killed everyone from overcrowding.
Hans Rosling showed it quite well in a TED talk he gave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVk1ahRF78
But mainly, the title is provocative and misleading. The article clearly states, he was asked a leading question "asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria", and he answered. The title makes it seem like he went out of his way to make the comparison and put himself on a pedestal, but thats not what happened.